Fingerprint authentication methods are well known in the art. One typical method using fingerprint security involves storing a user's fingerprint, transmitting the fingerprint across a network, and validating the fingerprint at a printer or a computing device. Using this method, a fingerprint can be stolen simply by gaining access to the storage mechanism or by sniffing network packets. Thus, opening the possibility that images or documents using the above fingerprint security could also be stolen.
Another method using fingerprint security is a public key algorithm. In public key algorithms, the data is stored. The algorithm requires the key to be authenticated. Once the key is authenticated all the data is readable and available for access. Since the data is stored in the public key algorithm, the data can potentially be stolen, compromising the security. Therefore, public key algorithms may not be better than storing and validating the fingerprint as provided above.
While prior methods for encryption have been successful, there exists a need for an encryption method that does not store and/or transmit the fingerprint information over the network, and only uses the fingerprint as an initialization seed for a data encryption algorithm.